STEM CORNER: Highlighting Successful Women in STEM
Our new Maths Club initiative to connect students with women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-based careers launched in our last newsletter. We will continue to share these explorations and learnings in our ‘STEM Corner’.
This edition features an interview from Angelina Severino and Savannah Lin (pictured above) of Year 8 with Professor Lisa Alexander (pictured below). Professor Alexander has experience as a climate researcher for the Climate Change Research Centre, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and the University of New South Wales. She has kindly agreed to speak with us about her career journey and offer advice to MSCW students.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: How would you best describe what your work involves? Do you have a lot of theoretical research work or do you have to do practical testing too?
PROF. ALEXANDER: My work mostly focuses on climate extremes (things like heat waves, heavy rainfall). I try and understand how these have changed in the past (using observations), how well our climate models can simulate past changes (by comparing model output with observations) and estimating what might happen in the future under climate change (using models with different scenarios of future climate). So this involves theoretical work (what I think should happen based on physical or dynamical considerations) but also practical testing like writing computer code and developing statistics to understand the changes. My work was the first to show that past changes in Australian climate extremes could not be explained by natural climate variations (i.e. they exhibited a human fingerprint). Furthermore I showed that Australia would likely undergo significant changes in temperature and rainfall extremes by the end of the century and that the amount of greenhouse gases emitted would be crucial in determining how “extreme” these changes would be. Obviously those changes depend on our choices with respect to current and future greenhouse gas emissions.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What are the main skills and knowledge this career requires?
PROF. ALEXANDER: You need good quantitative skills. Most people will have done high-level mathematics, physics or computer/data science at undergraduate or postgraduate level.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: Did you enjoy school and what STEM courses did you enjoy most at school?
PROF. ALEXANDER: I’ll be honest and say not really! Not that I thought school was terrible, I just didn’t particularly enjoy it. I did enjoy Maths though!
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What things most influenced you to enter into climate research?
PROF. ALEXANDER: I did an undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics and a Masters in Computational Science. As part of my Masters I did a module on climate modelling. At the same time a job was advertised to ‘work with top models’ at the Met Office (the UK equivalent of the Bureau of Meteorology). I applied and got a job. Later I moved to the Bureau and then to Monash University where I did a PhD on looking at climate extremes over Australia. After that I got a job as an academic staff member at the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW. My job allows me to combine my love of Maths, data analysis and computing with working on an environmentally-relevant and globally important topic that has huge real-world implications.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What were or have been the barriers to entering your career and having success in this field? How do you think your gender helped or hindered this?
PROF. ALEXANDER: Good question. It’s really hard to know. In some ways being in a minority has helped me to push myself (when I worked for the Met Office there was a 80%/20% M/F ratio – it’s a lot better now). There are definitely lots of studies though that suggest that women do experience more barriers than men in STEM careers, having kids for one. It’s really important I think to have female mentors and I try to be a good role model for my students. Personally I’ve exceeded all the expectations I set for myself career-wise. As a kid if you’d told me I’d be a Professor I would have laughed (and then asked what a Professor was!). I never even planned to go to university (and I was the first one in my family who did) so I’m pretty happy where I ended up.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What technology, methods or tools do you use to progress your analysis and research?
PROF. ALEXANDER: I have to handle large datasets, climate models and observations which are many Petabytes (soon to be exabytes). This requires relatively advanced knowledge of coding, statistics, supercomputing and quantitative data analysis. It also can take a long time to process such large volumes of data. For example, a one hundred year simulation from a climate model might take several months to run on a supercomputer and then it could take several more months to analyse. Output is also in binary format so you have to use special software and tools to analyse this. In addition to the supercomputing facilities at UNSW, I make use of the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) which is a large supercomputing facility based in Canberra. With the right permissions you can remotely log into the supercomputer there (Gadi) and run your simulations and do data analysis there.
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What is a challenge that you’ve had to face in your career journey, and how did you overcome it or how would you advise others to overcome it?
PROF. ALEXANDER: I’ve moved several times with my work (often in research your initial positions might not be permanent). Having a partner (and/or family) that you need to move with can complicate this. This is often referred to as the two-body problem. It might mean you or your partner/family making a move, possibly overseas, or taking a job you don’t want. In my case, I’ve always got the job I wanted but maybe my partner on occasion has had to make career choices they didn’t necessarily want. This will probably necessitate some difficult conversations with your partner if you decide on a career in research!
ANGELINA AND SAVANNAH: What advice would you give someone who would like to get into climate research?
PROF. ALEXANDER: Do well in Maths, be curious, have a love of data and computing and a desire to focus on a “defining issue of our time”.
Thank you, Professor Alexander, and well done, Angelina and Harriet, for an insightful interview!
